In honor of MCA DAY celebrating the life and legacy of MCA from the Beastie Boys.
Our very own DJ Alarm, brings us this unique Video mix of MCA aka Nathaniel Hornblower directed videos of classic Beastie Boys songs.
More information about MCA DAY – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcadaynyc/mca-day-celebrating-the-life-of-adam-mca-yauch
“Back in 2012, one of our idols, Adam Yauch, MCA, tragically lost his battle to cancer. I immediately put a call out to fans to join me outside to pay our respects to MCA and listen to his music. A week later, I showed up to Union Square in Manhattan with a table, an easel, some markers, a boomboxand a grip of batteries.”
Adam Nathaniel Yauch (pronounced /ˈjaʊk/; August 5, 1964 – May 4, 2012) was an American rapper, musician, songwriter, director and film distributor. He was best known as a founding member of the hip hop group Beastie Boys. He was frequently known by his stage name, MCA, and sometimes worked under the pseudonym Nathanial Hörnblowér.
Yauch founded Oscilloscope Laboratories, an independent film production and distribution company based in New York City. As a Buddhist, he was involved in the Tibetan independence movement and organized the Tibetan Freedom Concert.[2]
Beastie Boys co-founder Adam “MCA” Yauch – whose band transformed hip-hop in the 1980s and was among the leaders of the alt-rock revolution in the 1990s – died of complications from cancer on May 4th. He was 47. “Yauch was the spiritual leader of the group,” says his friend Questlove. “Michael Jacksonwasn’t allowed to grow up. The Beastie Boys did.”
Yauch was diagnosed with cancer in his salivary gland and a lymph node in 2009, undergoing surgery that year. The cancer continued to spread over the past three years as Yauch tried holistic treatments and chemotherapy. He was admitted on April 14th to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he died surrounded by his parents, his wife, Dechen, and their 13-year-old daughter, Tenzin Losel.
Yauch was the Beasties’ oldest member, their distinctive growling voice and (as his co-medic alter ego, Nathanial Hornblower) the director of many of their iconic videos. Starting in 1996, he organized the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, helping to make political activism a central concern of the Lollapalooza generation.
The news of his loss sent shock waves through the music world. Public Enemy‘s Chuck D – who inducted the Beasties into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month, when Yauch was too ill to attend – declared he was “teary-eyed.” Eminem said Yauch “brought a lot of positivity into the world.”
Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels first met the Beasties in the mid-Eighties after being introduced to them by producer Rick Rubin – immediately pegging Yauch as the “mature” member of the trio. “He was one of the top 10 voices in hip-hop,” DMC says. “He was the one who made you go, ‘These dudes are for real.’ Now I know how people felt when Jimi and Janis and Elvis passed away.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1964, Yauch was the son of an architect, Noel, and a public school administrator, Frances. He learned to play bass as a teenager, founding the Beasties as a hardcore band with members including childhood friend Mike Diamond (a.k.a. Mike D) and, later, Adam Horovitz (a.k.a. Ad-Rock). But hip-hop was inescapable in early-Eighties New York, and soon the trio began rapping. After hooking up with Rubin, they made music history with 1986’s Licensed to Ill– the first rap album to top the charts, eventually selling 9 million copies.